quotes by Scarlett Thomas

"I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"If something wants to be a story, it will be."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you."
— Scarlett Thomas (PopCo)

"Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free. . . . It's a dangerous world out there, filled with predators. . . . What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage, or an uncertain life of freedom."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

"Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.

Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.

No, I realise. It's the reverse. "
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.
"
— Scarlett Thomas (PopCo)

"Routine kills creative thought."
— Scarlett Thomas (PopCo)

"Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic."
— Scarlett Thomas (PopCo)

"One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes."
— Scarlett Thomas (PopCo)

"I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.""
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"Homeopaths argue that water has a memory."
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

"Not all events are stories."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

"People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

""So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins.

"What?"

"We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."

"Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time." "
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)

"I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?"
— Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)